Congressman Charlie Rangel admits he’s played the race card to get what he wants in Washington, according to a manuscript of his memoir due out in April.

When former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski tried to block him from a House-Senate conference, Rangel – who claimed he was snubbed because he wouldn’t promise to vote the chair’s way – took action.

He said, “But Rosty, I’m black. I can’t explain to anybody why as a senior member I was not recommended.”

When Rostenkowski asked, “You’re not playing the race card on me, are you?” Rangel replied, “Yes, I am.”

The conversation is just one of many bombshell revelations in the autobiography by Democrat Rangel, 76, arguably the most powerful New Yorker in Washington.

He portrays himself as a “guy from Lenox Avenue” – but he’s clashed with titans, mastered backroom politics and bristled at President Nixon’s racist rants.

He has plenty to say about friends – and even more about foes – according to the manuscript.

Rangel, who achieved a career-long goal when he was recently named chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings when he listened to hours of tapes redacted from the official transcripts.

“I hear Nixon, clearly under the influence of alcohol, sharing with his staff a rumor that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was dying of cancer,” he writes in “And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since.”

“He said he hoped that the ‘Negroes’ would not expect him to replace Marshall with another black. He went on to say that the Jewish people felt the same way about Supreme Court seats. But in Nixon’s opinion, on this tape, having Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on hand was ‘enough Jewish for everybody.’ ”

Rangel was able to forge relationships with friends in high places. One of them was Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who presented a political gift to Rangel.

“When I first ran for Congress, sometime in the summer of 1970, someone told me the governor had a birthday present for me,” Rangel writes,

Rockefeller told him they were drawing congressional district lines. “Then he hands me a grease pencil.”

“I proceeded to draw myself a wicked district in Manhattan,” Rangel wrote, adding that now “the people in Albany make no bones about it; the first district [drawn during reapportionment] is Charlie Rangel’s. Everything else has to fill in place around it.”

But Rangel also had his tussles with powerful foes.

He criticizes Adam Clayton Powell IV, who threatened to challenge Rangel in 2004 even though “he doesn’t like to work hard,” and Herman Badillo, who once dubbed Rangel one of a “gang of four” that stabbed him in the back during his run for mayor.